This new Clinton ad is simply crass. Say what you will about Obama, but it’s hard not to watch an ad like this and come away unmoved. Clinton wants us to believe she’s fresh off an overnight at Dunkin Donuts, Obama wants to change the world. Neither may be actually true, I’ll take sketchy hope over pretense any day.

If only for the novelty of it all, I’m running an ad in Facebook, targeting “targeting liberal and moderate people between 18 and 60 years old in Charlottetown, PE.” Facebook says there are 3,060 of these people out there. We’ll see what happens.

Update: Looks like I’m not running a Facebook ad after all:

The text of this ad contains excessive or incorrect capitalization. All ads must use appropriate, grammatically correct capitalization. The title of your ad, as well as the first word in each sentence, must begin with a capital letter. Lastly, all proper nouns and acronyms should be capitalized. As per section 4 of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines, all ads should include standard and proper capitalization.

Lord knows what would happen if silverorange, e.e. cummings or the fifth estate — lower-case tilted all — try to advertise on Facebook.

The Valentine’s Day episode of the excellent This American Life program is well worth a listen: its theme is “people who have been in the same relationship for years” and it’s a welcome respite from the love is everything meme that soaks this season.

My favourite part of the episode is the essay Istanbul by Canadian writer and broadcaster Ian Brown. Here is Brown on “open marriage:”

That’s why monogamy has such a bad reputation: it’s boring. Monogamy is the habit of not acting on what you want. I even hate the word itself: it sounds so staid, so bourgeois. Monogamy. Like a board game. The approximation of excitement. Sometimes of course I hear about “open marriages.” Jung had one. Sartre had one. Henry Miller, Dickens, Freud. I hear about open marriages and they seem like some fabulous exotic city that I’ve always wanted to visit, but never seem to get to. Istanbul. Open marriages are like Istanbul: some ancient, mysterious place where there are minarets and strange music, where one entire civilization suddenly ends and a whole new stranger one begins. A whole new religion even. The mysterious east. I’ve always wanted to go to Istanbul.

You only have a few more days to grab the free MP3 of this episode — it’s oddly available only for a week after it’s first broadcast.

If you like what you hear on This American Life, here are three additional things you might want to check out:

• Host Ira Glass’s Manifesto
• This American Life FAQ (even if you don’t have any questions, it’s a nice read)
• Radio: an Illustrated Guide, a comic book about how to make a good radio show.

British writer and actor Stephen Fry has started a podcast. Episode One:

Stephen Fry discloses his work for the past two years including his performances for ITV’s series “Kingdom”, script writing for director Peter Jackson’s forthcoming film “The Dam Busters” and the pitfalls of filming in the Amazon jungle and breaking his arm whilst preventing his not inconsiderable weight from plunging into the murky depths of the Amazon River.

If you are new to Stephen Fry, this New Yorker article is an interesting place to start.

My letter to Planning Board elicited a friendly email pointing me to the Canadian Urban Institute, a “non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the quality of life in urban areas across Canada and internationally.” News to me, and looks like an interesting bunch with which I share a lot in common philosophically.

The Institute’s website led me onwards to Canadian Brownfields 2008, a conference being held in October 2008 in Toronto. What’s a brownfield? Turns out that a word used to describe:

Vacant, abandoned, or underutilized commercial and industrial properties, where real or perceived environmental contamination is an obstacle to redevelopment or utilization. Often the site of old industrial complexes and chemical pollution.

One hint to the organizers of the “CUI Brownies” awards, that “acknowledge the significant strides taken in brownfield redevelopment:” using the phrase “percolating across the country” is probably best avoided in this context. Makes visions of oozing toxic sludge dance in my head.

Today was not so bleak, as it turned out: there was sun and some faint (faint) sense of warmth. But this is a brief respite from the alternating bouts of heavy snow and teeming rain we’ve been having since Christmas. Surprisingly, given this weather, we seem to be avoiding the prospect of the “meltdown season” so far. It’s early yet, though, so there’s still plenty of time for complete mental collapse before spring arrives in four months.

There is perhaps no better work that captures this part of the year than In the Bleak Midwinter:

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.

No rendering of this lyrics captures its spirit better than the version on the now-alas-out-of-print CD A Celebration of the American Farm by David Schnaufer and Stephen Seifert.

If you can track down a used copy of that CD, which was created in partnership with our friend at The Old Farmer’s Almanac, you should; it’s got a bunch of great tracks from artists ranging from Maura O’Connell and Nanci Griffith to the Nashville Chamber Orchestra.

Of course if you’re looking for a somewhat more hopeful take on the season, there is always Raise the Dead of Wintertime from Allan Rankin (clip):

And when at night we’re by the stove
Our bellies full and our stories told
The winds of winter might blow cold
But none of us will feel it

I took a week to think more about the proposed office tower two doors down from my office and over the weekend I put together a formal response to the City of Charlottetown’s request for comments. Here’s the letter I dropped off yesterday at the Planning Department at City Hall.

Geo-targetting of advertising, something I am not unfamiliar with myself, has evolved to the point where custom graphics can be burned into ads to (sort of) make them look like they are meant just for you. Here’s one that got served to me today:

Stripping aside all the sexual and body image politics the ad brings to light, “Meet a Real Girl Today in Tracadie” would make for an excellent title for my first novel (if my first novel were to be a W.O. Mitchell-style coming of age tale set in Prince Edward Island’s north shore).

[[Johnny]] phoned in a tizzy this afternoon to tell me that Jian Ghomeshi was on Q announcing that I was one of the winners of the “6 Word Love Story” contest. I heard the announcement of the contest while driving over to Sackville on Tuesday, so I had 4 hours of time in the car to mull over my entry. Which ended up as:

You’re dying.
I cut your toenails.

It’s a poem inspired by actual toenails. And actual love. I won, it seems, in the category “real little love stories” and won a showdown against “Saw her today, cried all night” thanks to judging (audio) by The Trews.

It’s been a heady, poetry-filled week.

After some excellent pre-sales advice about what my next mobile device should be, I went looking around for good prices on a Nokia N95.

I immediately started to notice an odd trend: brand new the N95 sells for over $600. But I found it for sale on eBay, and through Froogle for much less — $300 to $400. All of the cheap phones had something else in common: the same cut-and-pasted descriptive text about the device, including this feature list:

Other functions: MP3 functionses, MP4 functionses, don`t need to lift to converse, message hair, recording function, WAP function, handwritten importation, handwritten keyboard importation, blue tooth function, GPRS download, the MMS colorful message, memory expand, single card list treat, converse double to recording, the IP stir number, calculator, healthy management

I’m fairly confident that “message hair” is not a standard N95 feature (although I would love a phone with that ability, whatever that ability actually is). And then I read the smaller print on several of the ads and found:

This is a copy of the Nokia N95.

It appears that these cheap phones are not, in fact, actual Nokia N95 phones, but rather phones “inspired by” the N95. Not that you’d ever know that unless you read carefully. Caveat emptor.